Microsoft Buys Storage Optimizer Avere Systems

I’ve written about Avere Systems recently, and how impressed I am with the company and its products. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who saw the potential in its storage solutions, as it was just acquired by Microsoft.

Avere’s mission of optimizing flash storage for greater speed and efficiency is a perfect fit for Microsoft, with its focus on public cloud – through Azure – and hybrid cloud environments with its recent release of Azure Stack.

In a blog post, Avere president and CEO Ronald Bianchini Jr. elaborated on the fit for both companies. “Avere and Microsoft both recognize that there are many ways for Enterprises to leverage data center resources and the cloud. Our shared vision is to continue our focus on all of Avere’s use cases – in the datacenter, in the cloud and in hybrid cloud storage and cloud bursting environments.”

Avere’s Edge Filer Series provides an innovate combination of caching technology and file systems to enable very large workloads to be used in public and hybrid cloud environments. Those types of large-scale efforts – including such demanding workloads as financial trading algorithms – were typically handled in on-premises datacenters in the past. One reason was that the underlying storage systems simply couldn’t keep up.

No more. Avere will help Microsoft’s cloud customers do pretty much anything they can imagine in the cloud. Jason Zander, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President for Azure, noted some of those uses in a blog post: “The Library of Congress, Johns Hopkins University and Teradyne, a developer and supplier of automatic test equipment for the semiconductor industry, are great examples where Avere has helped scale datacenter performance and capacity, and optimize infrastructure placement.”

No details of the purchase were announced. Avere was founded in 2008, and has raised a total of $86 million in its various rounds of funding. More information on its products can be found here.